For film critics and most moviegoers, the 2010 production of
Gulliver's Travels, directed by Rob Letterman and
starring Jack Black as Lemuel Gulliver, is now headed for a
lingering, probably diminishing existence on DVD after being
briefly mocked and lamented during its time in theaters. For people
interested in Swift's work or in the eighteenth century, however,
Gulliver's Travels has a different afterlife as we
confront its effects. Film adaptation theorists such as Imelda
Whelehan, Deborah Cartmell, and Brian McFarlane have suggested that
adaptations are not subordinate to originary texts but rather stand
in an "intertextual" relationship with them, each affecting the
perception and enhancing the cultural standing of the other. As I
have proposed elsewhere, adaptations may increase attention to an
original, but the nature of that attention is significant. In the
case of this Gulliver's Travels, what do people now
know or think they know or have had confirmed about Swift's
narrative or about history by this film? What was the "cultural
capital," to borrow a favorite phrase of intertextual film critics,
of Swift's work before and during the film's run, and what is it
now? During fall 2010, for example, Fox Television used
Gulliver's Travels to open episodes of its reality
show Hell's Kitchen. Each week, audiences watched the
contestants as irritating and vaguely menacing Lilliputians
force-feeding Chef Gordon Ramsay as Gulliver before the cooking
competition began. This unusually large presence in popular media
is complicated by the fact that Fox Television is the sister
company of Twentieth Century Fox, which released the film.
Gulliver's Travels thus takes on a life both as a
merchandising tool and a product to be placed: a commodity whose
value is important to new economic forces and both definable and
measurable in new ways. Encompassing all these issues is the matter
of our own historical moment, its nature, and how we construct what
came before "now." Although unimpressive even at its best moments,
this Gulliver's Travels does raise some issues about
adaptations and the construction of history worth thinking
about.

As an adaptation, the film's connection to the original
narrative is primarily indirect. Direct transfers include a main
character named Lemuel Gulliver, who travels to the island of
Lilliput where he seems big and to another island where he seems
small. He extinguishes the palace fire in Lilliput by urinating on
it (the film's General Edward Edwardian, called "Edward" throughout
the film after he introduces himself, shouts at Gulliver about
"evacuating" on the palace, a small borrowing from Swift), and
captures the Blefuscian (as it is called in the film) fleet by
grabbing their anchor ropes and pulling them to shore. More
numerous are elements that have been transposed. The film's General
Edward conspires against Gulliver for stealing his glory and
credibility at court and for supporting the general's rival for the
princess's affections, whereas in the text a cabal including an
admiral (goaded to action after Gulliver triumphs over the
Blefuscudian navy), a general, and a treasurer (enraged by rumors
of his wife's indiscretions with Gulliver) forms to eliminate him.
General Edward goes to Blefuscu to get rid of Gulliver; Swift's
Gulliver flees to Blefuscu after learning of plans to execute him.
In the film, some of Gulliver's possessions wash up on shore (thus
providing the General with his plan for a robot), while the
original Lilliputians itemize the contents of Gulliver's pockets.
And so on. Despite the frequent laments of reviewers (many of whom
characterized the "palace fire" scene as an offense against a
classic text) that screenwriters Joe Stillman and Nicholas Stoller
abandoned Swift's narrative, in fact, attention to Swift's work
reveals that the screenwriters have included a larger number of
elements than might be thought.

This transposition of pieces from the original narrative does
not mean that Swift's ideas came with them, however. In
modernizing, that is, "updating" the story—instead of a pocket
watch, the Lilliputians discover Gulliver's cell phone and so
on—the screenwriters have modified the function of those analogous
elements in order to change the function of the...

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